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680 Death of Muawiyah I, Umayyad caliph.

820  "A small and unusual stela once stood next to Temple 18 at Copan in Honduras. Carved in shallow relief, Stela 11 … is more a decorated column than a continuation of the magnificent tradition of larger-than-life stone portraits that still dance in the north plaza of this peaceful national park. It is unusual in other ways, for Stela 11 portrays King Yax-Pak, the last great king of Copan, on May 6, 820 A.D., celebrating the half Katun 9.19.10.0.0, when he had already departed this world for the Otherworld. The aged, bearded lord stands upon a glyph for Black Transformer, the portal between this world and the world of the ancestors and the gods."   Source

1236 Death of Roger of Wendover, English chronicler of the 13^th century, the first of the important chroniclers who worked at St Albans Abbey. His best-known chronicle is called the Flores Historiarum (Flowers of History). Probably a native of Wendover in Buckinghamshire, at some uncertain date Roger became a monk at St Albans; afterwards he was appointed prior of the cell of Belvoir, but he forfeited this dignity in the early years of Henry III, having been found guilty of wasting the endowments.

1502 James Tyrrell, alleged murderer of the Princes in the Tower, was executed.

1527 Spanish and German troops sacked Rome; some consider this the end of the Renaissance.

1536 Manco Inca Yupanqui rose up against the Spanish conquerors.

1555 Death of Pope Marcellus II on his 54^th birthday.

1626 New World: Dutch official Peter Minuit (first general director of the Dutch colony of New Netherland) 'bought' the 57 sq km (22 sq miles) Manhattan Island from the Manahatta Indians, (Shinnecock Indians?) who lived in Brooklyn, for trinkets valued at US$24.

1638 Death by plague of Cornelius Jansen (Jansenius; b. 1585), theologian, inspirer of the Jansenists.

1682 Louis XIV of France moved his court to Versailles.

1782 James Price, a Guildford, England, chemist, began an experiment (concluded on May 25) to turn mercury (another source says sulphur, and another, half a grain of 'a certain powder of deep red colour' with some heated mercury; yet another refers to a white powder with mercury, borax and nitre, as well as silver) into gold. He presented some of his supposed gold to King George III, and was awarded the degree of MD by Oxford University.

Sir Joseph Banks (the botanist famed for his work in Australia with Captain James Cook) and suspicious members of the Royal Society asked him to repeat his experiments publicly. For this purpose he left London, in January 1783, for his laboratory at Guildford, faithfully promising to return in a month, and confound and convince all his opponents. Eight months passed, and on August 3, 1783, Price called a meeting of Royal Society members at his home, but only three very dubious RS members showed – and Price drank prussic acid in front of them, falling dead. It may be seen to mark the death of traditional alchemy in England.

One source tells the event without mentioning that Price was found out, as though he had in fact discovered the alchemists' 'philosophers' stone' – the ability to make gold from base materials.

On September 24, 1541, one of history's greatest alchemists, Paracelsus (b. 1493, though sources vary as to date), made his will, but there was no mention of gold or silver, the alchemists' holy grail. His only legacy was a 125 grams (approx. 4 oz Troy/Apoth.) silver chalice. Paracelsus died in 1541, possibly from a fall (he was a heavy drinker).

More  More on the philosophers' stone    More on Paracelsus    Yet more on Paraclesus

Alchemists in the Almanac:  Cornelius Agrippa  Roger Bacon  Count Cagliostro  John Dee
Edward Kelley  Robert Fludd  Isaac Newton  Paracelsus  Tycho Brahe  Raymond Lulle

1794 Toussaint L'Ouverture led the Haitian Revolution for independence. He was the inspiration for African-American painter Jacob Lawrence's Toussaint L'Ouverture series of paintings.

1835 James Gordon Bennett, Sr published the first issue of the New York Herald.

1851 American Linus Yale (1821 - 1868) invented the Yale lock.

1861 American Civil War: Arkansas seceded from the Union.

1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from Genoa, Italy, with about 1,000 men and reached Marsala, Sicily, five days later. He declared himself dictator in the name of King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, and soon took other towns and regions of Sicily.

1862 The death of Henry David Thoreau, American back-to-the-land advocate, war tax resister, jailbird and author of On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Writer Ralph Waldo Emerson walked by the jail one day and found Thoreau inside for refusal to pay tax that would pay for war. Emerson asked, "Henry, what are you doing in there?!" The author of Walden looked at the great transcendental essayist and asked, "No, Waldo, the question is, what are you doing out there?"

"Climate change is devastating the flowers of Walden Pond, picking off those species that cannot react to rising temperatures.

"Comparing data meticulously gathered by Henry David Thoreau more than a century and a half ago with more recent observations, Harvard biologists report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that more than a quarter of Walden's plant species have already been lost. And an additional 36 percent are in imminent danger, including lilacs, roses and buttercups."   Source   (Related: Phenology in the Book of Days)

1877 Realizing that his people were weakened by cold and hunger, Chief Crazy Horse of the Oglala Sioux surrendered to United States troops in Nebraska, relinquishing all claims to Indian lands.

Crazy Horse Memorial

1880 English novelist, George Eliot, married her friend, John Cross, an American banker who was twenty years her junior.

"They made a trip to Italy and according to a story, he jumped in Venice from their hotel balcony into the Grand Canal. After honeymoon they returned to London, where she died of a kidney ailment on the same year on December 22. Cross never married again. In her will she expressed her wish to be buried in Westminster Abbey, but Dean Stanley of Westminster Abbey rejected the idea and Eliot was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Eliot's interest in the interior life of human beings, moral problems and strains, anticipated the narrative methods of modern literature. D.H. Lawrence once wrote: "It was really George Eliot who started it all. It was she started putting action inside.'"   Source

1882 Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland dedicated Epping Forest, England, to the use of the people for all time.

1882 The Phoenix Park murders: The Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and Thomas Henry Burke were assassinated in Phoenix Park in Dublin, Ireland. Responsibility for the assassinations was claimed by a small republican organisation called 'the Invincibles'. In the aftermath, the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell offered to resign from parliament in protest at what he called "these vile murders", an offer turned down by the British Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone.

1886 Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia: Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP) smelters commenced operations founded on the Broken Hill Ore Deposit – the world's richest lead-zinc ore body. BHP Billiton is now the largest mining company in the world.

1889 The Eiffel Tower was officially opened to the public at the Universal Exposition in Paris.

1910 George V became King of the United Kingdom upon the death of his father, Edward VII.

1935 New Deal (USA): Executive Order 7034 created the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

1937 Hindenburg disaster: The German zeppelin Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed within a minute while attempting to dock at Lakehurst, New Jersey, causing the deaths of 35 of the 97 people on board, and that of one ground crew member. However, of the 36 fatalities, 33 died after jumping from the craft.

It was the largest aircraft ever to fly – longer than three football fields (about 250 metres long). The famous airship was on its 21^st visit to North America, on a trip funded by Nazi Germany's Ministry of Propaganda. On these visits, the Hindenburg's loudspeakers broadcast Nazi propaganda, and the crew dropped thousands of small Nazi flags for American children below.  

Was hydrogen to blame?

Whether hydrogen was to blame is a matter of some controversy.

Wikipedia writes: "Although the evidence is by no means conclusive, a reasonably strong case can be made for an alternative theory that the fire was started by a spark caused by static buildup. Proponents of the 'static spark' theory point to the following:

"The airship's skin was not constructed in a way that allowed its charge to be evenly distributed and the skin was separated from the aluminium frame by nonconductive ramie cords. The ship passed through a moist weather front. The mooring lines were wet and therefore conductive. As the ship moved through the moist air the skin became charged. When the wet mooring lines connected to the aluminium frame touched the ground they grounded the aluminium frame. The grounding of the frame caused an electrical discharge to jump from the skin to the grounded frame. Witnesses reported seeing a glow consistent with a St Elmo's fire." [See June 2 in the Book of Days for more on St Elmo and his 'fire'.]

Australian scientist and media commentator on science, Karl Kruszelnicki, argues that hydrogen, the flammable gas that filled the zeppelin's 'balloon', was not the reason for the famous disaster.

Kruszelnicki writes: "At that time, the US government controlled the only significant supplies of helium (a non-flammable lifting gas), and refused to supply it to the Nazi government. So the Hindenburg had to use flammable hydrogen.

"... on  May 6, 1937, there was a storm brewing, and so there was much static electricity in the air – which charged up the aircraft. When the crew dropped the mooring ropes down to the ground, the static electricity was earthed, which set off sparks on the Hindenburg.

"The Hindenburg was covered with cotton fabric, that … had been swabbed with cellulose acetate (which happened to be very inflammable) that was then covered with aluminium powder (which is used as rocket fuel to propel the Space Shuttle into orbit) … It was inevitable that a charged atmosphere would ignite the flammable skin.

FBI - Freedom of Information Act - The Hindenburg Disaster  

1940 John Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Grapes of Wrath.

1941 At California's March Field, Bob Hope performed his first USO show.

1942 World War II: On Corregidor, the last American forces in the Philippines surrendered to the Japanese.

1944 After decline in his health, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi), Indian leader and proponent of civil disobedience, was released unconditionally from detention. This was his last imprisonment; he had spent 2,338 days in jail during his life-time.

"Mohandas Karamchand "Mahatma" (Sanskrit: "great soul") Gandhi (October 2, 1869 - January 30, 1948) was one of the founding fathers of the modern Indian state and an influential advocate of pacifism as a means of revolution. (See also: Mahatmas.)"   Source

Gandhi Timeline

1945 World War II: Axis Sally delivered her last propaganda broadcast to Allied troops (first was on December 11, 1941).

Was this the first 4-minute mile?

1954 British athlete, Roger Bannister (now Sir Roger, KBE; b. 1929), became the first human to run the mile in less than four minutes, at Iffley Road track in Oxford, UK.

However, according to an eminent British sports historian, Peter Radford, Professor of Sports Science at Brunel University, a double Olympic medallist and former chairman of the British Athletic Federation, it is likely that Bannister's sub-four-minute achievement was made nearly two centuries before, not very far from where Bannister ran 3 min 59.4 s at Oxford.

According to Prof. Radford, a certain costermonger named James Parrot might have run the first four-minute mile on May 9, 1770 – settling a bet and winning 15 guineas for his exertions. He writes:

However, Mel Watman, author of Encyclopedia Of Track And Field Athletics and the sport's leading statistician, dismisses Radford's claim about Parrot.

I'm highly dubious. How accurate was the distance and the timing? I think this is just folklore. As far as I'm concerned the outstanding distance runner of the nineteenth century was Walter George [who set a world record for the mile of 4:12.75 in 1886 that stood for 37 years]. He ran times that for his era were phenomenal. He was decades ahead of his time and should be considered the first great miler of his time. So I can't believe that a 100 years before him there was someone else.   Source

Bannister's 4 minute mile record revisited

1966 British Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were jailed for life.

1968 May 1968, Paris: Parisian Universities were closed, and new demonstrations of solidarity with those rounded up and jailed in the May 3 demonstrations ended in violent confrontations with police. There were more than 900 wounded and 422 arrests.

More at the Daily Bleed

Daniel Cohn-Bendit

Wilson's Almanac Activism Page    CounterCulture Wiki

1968 Apple Corps, Ltd, The Beatles' new record company, management and publishing firm, opened offices at 95 Wigmore Street, London. 

1974 West German Chancellor Willy Brandt resigned after a spy was found on his staff.

1981 USA: A jury of architects and sculptors unanimously selected from 1,421 other entries Maya Ying Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

1983 The so-called Hitler Diaries were denounced by German experts as fakes.

1989 As a feature of Glasgow's Mayfest, artist George Wyllie launched a paper boat, named Origami, on the River Clyde. It was 18 m long by 12 m wide.

1994 Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and French President François Mitterrand inaugurated the opening of the Chunnel – a tunnel under the English Channel linking England and France for the first time since the end of the Great Ice Age.

1994 The famed Pearl Jam vs Ticketmaster fight began as the band filed a complaint with the US Justice Department charging that the company had a monopoly on the master ticket business.

Source: The Daily Bleed

2002 Jean-Pierre Raffarin became Prime Minister of France.

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